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Bottleneck question.

nitram100

nitram100

nitram100

Soldato
Joined
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So, I finally upgraded the old 5850 and will be getting my new 7950 tomorrow. I am slightly worried however that my CPU will be a huge bottleneck.

What do you guys think, will it be a massive bottleneck? It is only running at stock speeds so could OC it as I have a decent cooler.

Cheers,
 
CPU intensive games it'd be a bottleneck.
My friend had the same thing, he moved to an SB system to elevate it as he hated seeing his GPU usage.
 
It depends on what sort of games you play. If you play standalone/single player games (FPS, racing etc), the existing CPU wouldn't bottleneck too badly; however if you play games like mmos a lot, then you would probably see greater benefit upgrading your CPU/platform and keep your existing card than to get a faster card to use with your existing CPU.
 
I dont think that there will be a bottleneck since 7950 is not a 670 and i know people that buy gtx 670 and have a phenom 955...
 
Ok thanks for the input guys!

Just got the 7950 up and running and it does look as though there is a bottleneck, although I am not sure if it is that bad.

CPU usage in a 64 player Caspian Border game is hovering at 90% constantly and GPU usage doesn't really go above 63%, does that indicate a bottleneck?

If so, what would be my options? Would overclocking this CPU really make that much of a difference or should I just upgrade to Ivy Bridge and be done with it.

On a positive note, the card is amazing. At only 40% fan speed on auto the temp didn't go above 55C on Caspian Border and that is in a small Lian Li case.
 
Last edited:
HankScorpio said:
I had a 955 @ 3.6 and it caused a bottleneck in some games.
Click to expand...

Ok thanks mate. Can I just ask though, I know that the general consensus is that Bulldozer isn't very good, but are there any decent AM3+ chips that I could throw in my board that would alleviate the bottleneck somewhat?

I just loaded up Skyrim and the bottleneck was a lot less, although it did look like 1 core was maxing out the GPU usage was higher at about 70-75%.

Thanks guys,
 
HankScorpio said:
I had a 955 @ 3.6 and it caused a bottleneck in some games.
Click to expand...

You have the exact same CPU and motherboard that I am currently looking at for an Ivy Bridge upgrade.

In all honesty, did you think the whole switch was worth it?

Do you mind me asking which games you noticed an increase in with the new CPU?

Cheers,

Martin
 
If you want a cheap upgrade a i5-2400 would be great to unlock the power of that card minimizing the bottle neck to almost nothing. i belive anything higher than the i5-2320 with a 7950 should remove any major bottleneck problems if you lucky all of them. Don't hold me to that but the i5-2400 is a great CPU for gaming. you can also get thet i5 3570K with a 2011 socket motherboard. PCI-E 3.0 isn't much reason to upgrade to the Ivy CPU's if money is tight as with PCI-E 3,0 you'd get around 5 extra fps. Not 100% worth it on a budget. Just my opinion there
 
Yeh mate, thinking if I am going to go changing motherboard and CPU I might aswell go the full hog and future proof myself as much as I can.

Will try and get about 70 quid for my CPU and motherboard and put that towards the Ivy Bridge upgrade.
 
From using a 955 with a 7970 I noticed pretty bad performance in multiplayer bf3, dipped to 25-30 fps on wake island and skyrim was pretty choppy. Other games like starcraft 2 there was no difference since that ran 60 fps+ on my old 5770. The witcher 2 also was heavily choppy on AMD cpu and runs pretty smooth now.

I was able to sell my 955 for 67 quid and mobo for 45 which helped the upgrade.
 
HankScorpio said:
From using a 955 with a 7970 I noticed pretty bad performance in multiplayer bf3, dipped to 25-30 fps on wake island and skyrim was pretty choppy. Other games like starcraft 2 there was no difference since that ran 60 fps+ on my old 5770. The witcher 2 also was heavily choppy on AMD cpu and runs pretty smooth now.

I was able to sell my 955 for 67 quid and mobo for 45 which helped the upgrade.
Click to expand...

Nice one mate, you have me convinced! Now to find my boxes for the CPU and Motherboard so I can sell em :)
 
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